Overview
Cibele Moura is a doctoral candidate in music and sound studies at Cornell University. Much of her current research examines the power struggles at the intersection of popular music-making, listening practices, and knowledge production in Latin America. Her dissertation, titled “Listening to the Obscene: The Sexual Politics of Music and Sound in Latin America,” interrogates obscenity as a category of racialized sexuality in Latin American sonic cultures. It demonstrates how the politics of obscenity have shaped the reception of so-called vulgar music both within and outside Black and mestizo working-class communities, beginning with the Mexican Inquisition’s prohibition of songs in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing to the criminalization of Brazilian funk in contemporary news media. This project has received awards and financial support from several institutions, including the Society for American Music and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. She recently co-edited and co-translated of A luta pelo nacional popular na Bolívia (Editora da PUCRS, 2024), which introduces the heterodox Marxist work of one of Bolivia’s foremost political theorists, René Zavaleta Mercado, to Lusophone audiences.